The technical documents, white papers, instruction guides and other resources on this page have been provided as a service to the community.

Techical Targets
White Papers
Instructions
Color Spaces
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Imaging Guidelines & Training Guides

Hasselblad Phocus Calibration Guide

This informative guide provides all of the steps necessary for calibrating the Hasselblad digital camera system to meet the Metamorfoze and FADGI imaging guidelines. The guide includes specific instructions on creating custom ICC input profiles using BasICColor Input software.
Note: The guide and related documents will download as a 32MB .zip archive

Metamorfoze Imaging Guidelines

This is the formal Metmaorfoze guidelines document (English version 1.0) It includes the full specifications including technical descriptions and exposure tolerance tables for a wide range of technical targets. The Metamorfoze Guidelines have experienced rapid adoption worldwide due to the clearly defined pass /fail criteria and support for a wide range of existing targets

FADGI Imaging Guidelines

The FADGI (Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative) is a collaborative effort Started in 2007 by US federal agencies to define common guidelines, methods, and practices for digitizing historical content. Two working groups are studying issues specific to two major areas, Still Image and Audio Visual. This is the most recent version of the still image guidelines

White Papers

ISO Standards for Museum Imaging

Originally published in 2008 this document looks at the role of standards in the cultural heritage community and documents a series of digital capture to standardized printing tests across multiple museums in the US and Europe. The document questions the status quo in terms of the computer industry as it relates to stadnardization

Implementing Imaging Standards

Published in 2009, This paper follows up the ISO standards paper with expaned testing across leading cultural heritage instituions. At this stage, the standards that were forming up in Europe (Metamorfoze) were included and in many ways, this was the beginning of a transition that is still taking place worldwide

Transitioning to International Standards

As the Metamorfoze standards continued to take hold in Europe, similar efforts were underway in the US via the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Inititiative (FADGI). This paper documents the evaluation of standardized imaging practices at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Color Charts (Digital Values)

X Rite® DCSG: eciRGBv2 values

This Tiff file equivalent of the XRite® Color Checker DCSG Chart™ file includes the actual eciRGBv2 RGB color values AND the important upper and lower value limits for each grayscale step based upon the Metamorfoze Preservation Imaging Guidelines

X Rite® DCSG: AdobeRGB values

This Tiff file equivalent of the XRite® Color Checker DCSG Chart™ file includes the actual AdobeRGB1998 RGB color values AND the important upper and lower value limits for each grayscale step based upon the Metamorfoze Preservation Imaging Guidelines

X Rite® DCSG: ProPhotoRGB values

This Tiff file equivalent of the XRite® Color Checker DCSG Chart™ file includes the actual ProPhoto RGB color values AND the important upper and lower value limits for each grayscale step based upon the Metamorfoze Preservation Imaging Guidelines

Grayscale Charts (Digital Values)

Q-14 Grayscale Chart Overlay

The Kodak Q-14 is a process control target that predates the digital photogrphay revolution yet is still a valuable imaging process control tool. This digital version includes L* values as well as AdobeRGB1998,ProPhotoRGB, and eciRGBv2 values. This file is designed to facilitate visual comparison of caputred values to referecne values. Note: This file will download as a .zip acrchive with a helpful instruction guide

100 Step L*A*B* Grayscale

This Tiff file equivalent of the 100 step L*A*B* lightness scale is useful for checking displays and other output devices for linearity and gray balance as well as to help measure tonal compression. A single L* lightness difference is often referred to as a just noticable difference (JND). Note: This file will download as a .zip archive and contains three working space encodings: sRGB,AdobeRGB1998, and eciRGBv2

Working Color Spaces

eciRGBv2 (L* Based Color Space)

The primary advantage of eciRGBv2 and L* based imaging is that tones are spaced evenly from black to white offering advanced imaging users finer editing precision-especially in the deep shadow regions. eciRGBv2 was adopted by the European Color Initiative (www.eci.org) in 2007 and is currently moving through the ISO standardization process as a formal technical specification. Note: This file will download as a .zip archive

L* Based Gray Space (Evaluation Only)

This ICC grayscale working space incorporates the same L* tone scaling as the eciRGBv2 working color space. The ICC profile is for evaluation only but can be valuable to explore the advantages of L* tonescale editing for extremely precise fine art grayscale photographic reproductions. Note: This file will download as a .zip archive

ProStarRGB (Evaluation Only)

ProStarRGB is a wide gamut RGB working color space based upon ProPhotoRGB primaries. The 1.8 gamma gradation has been modified to the same L* scaling as in eciRGBv2. Note: ProStarRGB is provided for evaluation only. This ICC profile will download as a .zip archive